DOUBLE LIVES

other things. They manufacture more artificial silk
than any other country in the world except the
United States—and them they rival; their merchant
marine is the third biggest on the seas and they send
steamers to Canada, India, Australia, France, and
Mexico; they export their products to England, New
Zealand, Brazil, Germany, Jamaica, Nigeria, and
Spain. In less than seventy years. Has such a change
ever passed through any other country on earth?
The face of this extraordinary land is perhaps the
more strange because the transformation is not com-
plete, because the old is not wiped out by the new,
but survives beside it.

The Prime Minister of Japan receives a salary of
£6ool a year. In Japan an undergraduate with average
brains but without "family" or influence may be
attracted to the Civil Service, as is still commonly
the case in England. Various branches of the Service
are open to him, some better paid than others; but
taking a very broad average, he will probably start
life in the service of the Japanese Government at a
salary of about seventy yen a month, or £50 sterling
a year. It is safe to say that his English counterpart
would receive four times that sum. To double his
salary will take the Japanese about ten years. By the
by the time he is thirty this university graduate will

1 He also receives much in allowances, like the Prime Ministers